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<TITLE>Letter Spirit</TITLE>
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<H2>Letter Spirit</H2>
<H3> An Emergent Model of the Perception and Creation of
Alphabetic Style</H3>
<STRONG>Description:</STRONG>
<P> <BLOCKQUOTE> The Letter Spirit project
is an attempt to model central aspects of human high-level perception
and creativity on a computer. It is based on the belief that
creativity is an automatic outcome of the existence of sufficiently
flexible and context-sensitive concepts --- what we call fluid
concepts.  Accordingly, our goal is to implement a model of fluid
concepts in a challenging domain. Not surprisingly, the Letter Spirit
project is a very complex undertaking and requires complex dynamic
memory structures, as well as a sophisticated control structure based
on the principles of emergent computation, wherein complex high-level
behavior emerges as a statistical consequence of many small
computational actions. The full realization of such a model will, we
believe, shed light on the mechanisms of human creativity.

The specific focus of Letter Spirit is the creative act of artistic
letter-design. The aim is to model how the 26 lowercase letters of the
roman alphabet can be rendered in many different but internally
coherent styles. The program addresses two important aspects of
letterforms: the categorical sameness possessed by letters belonging
to a given category ( e.g., `a') and the stylistic sameness possessed
by letters belonging to a given style ( e.g., Helvetica). Starting
with one or more seed letters representing the beginnings of a style,
the program will attempt to create the rest of the alphabet in such a
way that all 26 letters share that same style, or spirit.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<P>

<STRONG>Associated Faculty: </STRONG>
Douglas Hofstadter 
<P>

<STRONG>Associated Graduate Students: </STRONG>
John Rehling
<P>

<STRONG>Affiliated Projects: </STRONG>
Metacat (Douglas Hofstadter & Jim Marshall)
<P>

<STRONG>Support: </STRONG>
This research is supported by funding for the Center for Research on
Concepts and Cognition (CRCC) provided by the IU College of Arts and
Sciences.
<P>

<STRONG><!WA0><A
HREF="http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/farg/mcgrawg/lspirit.html">More
information</A></STRONG> <P>

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